Tag: Occult

Book synopsis: A woman confronts traumatic, childhood memories of the murder of her mother and two sisters when she investigates the possibility that her brother is innocent of the crime.

Movie Adaptation: Dark Places (2015)

Gone Girl led me here, lead me to read this one! And let me tell you, this one doesn’t disappoint! Flynn spins off this piece with quite ease, thanks to her spot-on narrative style, which she has aced!

This book mostly covers what happened after the big event, but it occasionally keeps swivelling back to the events before the big one.

It is really nicely written! I really appreciate the way Flynn has arranged the specks of events, far apart but not so much to seem far fetched or disorderly! You might think you were there all the way or almost there only to be proved wrong!

Wrong people, wrong perspectives, spurious events and the tedious that is the life and task of a survivor, and the exhaustive investigation, plus the survivor’s quest for the truth, for the unclouded version of the truth, is artfully revealed.

Here’s an excerpt:

Libby Day

Now

I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it. I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murders. Little Orphan Libby grew up sullen and boneless, shuffled around a group of lesser relatives—second cousins and great-aunts and friends of friends—stuck in a series of mobile homes or rotting ranch houses all across Kansas. Me going to school in my dead sisters’ hand-me-downs: Shirts with mustardy armpits. Pants with baggy bottoms, comically loose, held on with a raggedy belt cinched to the farthest hole. In class photos my hair was always crooked—barrettes hanging loosely from strands, as if they were airborne objects caught in the tangles—and I always had bulging pockets under my eyes, drunk-landlady eyes. Maybe a grudging curve of the lips where a smile should be. Maybe.

The novel along with its complex storyline is dark, almost disturbing (Massacre, Satanic cults). Make sure you have something happy to do while reading this or else the darkness will sweep you over. Incredibly demented , it’ll keep you scared, yet riveted to keep going!

You just sort of hang onto the book, hang on to it all the way, step by step until absolute finality finds you.

Finally, Flynn indeed accomplishes her mission to keep you guessing! Maybe that is infact the motto she lives by!

Do not read this if you like happy novels. This book may probably be the literature version of Black Metal music.